'It is the sober, little people of Sweden who are voting No'

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Norrkoping

12:01AM BST 15 Sep 2003

As vast machines disgorged one- ton rolls of newsprint for shipment to The Financial Times and The Telegraph, Roger Thornqvist complained bitterly that the anti-euro "No" campaign had been terrifying Swedes with lies.

The foreman said the 800 workers of Holmen Paper survived on exports with wafer-thin profit margins. If they voted "No" yesterday in a misguided fit of defiance, they did so at their peril.

"We deliver paper all over the EU and it makes it so much easier if we all use the same money and have the same interest rates," he said.

The biggest firm in Norrkoping - an old textile town now struggling to reinvent itself - Holmen ought to be the hard-core of the local "Yes" movement. The management is pro-euro; so is the pulp trade union, Pappers, which is backing the Social Democrat government. But the workers had refused to rally.

"I just don't buy this idea that we're going to be isolated," said Patrick Hjelm, 34, as he manned a line of computers with flashing grids. "Norway and Denmark are not part of the euro, or Britain. I'm much more worried that the European Central Bank is going to take control of our economy."

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Down the hall, Chilean-born Lorena Calisto put it in a nutshell. "All the little people I know are going to vote 'No'; the euro is for big business," she said, reflecting the widespread feelings of disgust with a brash corporate elite that has violated Sweden's solidarity code with monster pay-offs and bonuses.

Others have different gripes with the EU. For the 300,000 members of Sweden's temperance movement, many of them in the central Bible belt and the region's old industrial towns, there is lingering distrust of the EU's "culture of alcohol".

Liquor was rationed in Sweden until the late 1950s in an effort to stem binge drinking through the dark Nordic winters. To this day, taxes on spirits, wine and beer are crippling. Shoppers have to line up at the state-run "System Bolaget", which closes at weekends.

Sweden was assured that it could continue to stop cheap alcohol coming into the country when it joined the EU in 1995, prompting the government to publish a leaflet guaranteeing that Swedes alone would decide the drink laws.

The pledge was broken almost instantly. The European Commission ordered Sweden to conform with the EU's single-market rules. The European Court even ruled that Sweden's advertising ban on alcohol was illegal.

Maj-Britt Theorin, a Social Democrat MEP, said: "We were given a guarantee that we could keep drink laws and it has turned out to be a lie, like all the other promises in the 1994 referendum."

For others, it is Sweden's 200-year history of neutrality that is threatened. Johan Gillman, 25, a social studies teacher, said: "This is a new type of imperialism, a new way to manipulate people. France and Germany can't do it by themselves, so they have to do it through the EU."

Lars Jederlund, a leader of Sweden's Peace Society and a pro-euro activist, said this sort of thinking was pervasive. "I think it's sad. After what we saw in Iraq we need a strong Europe with military forces so that we don't have to depend on the United States."

The outcome of the vote will have precious little to do with the virtues and failings of EMU, or the krona. It will, in a sense, be Sweden's follow-up referendum on Europe itself, nine years on.